Sunday, September 18, 2011

"How a Book Can Change the World": This Week in the Book Reviews

"Is Marriage for White People?" In the New York Times Sunday Book Review Imani Perry takes up Stanford law professor Ralph Richard Banks's provocatively titled new book. Here's a taste:

Banks doesn’t offer a jeremiad about the decline of black family values
in the way of so many others who do little more than regurgitate Daniel
Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report . . . . Refreshingly, Banks offers a well-researched and probing
discussion of why marriage rates are so low among black Americans.

In clean and efficient prose, Banks presents a lucid picture of romantic
life in black America. Moreover, he disposes of the mythology that the
failure to marry is primarily an underclass phenomenon, turning his
attention especially to the lives of middle-class black women. He has
set out to answer the question: Why are black women “half as likely as
white women to be married, and more than three times as likely as white
women never to marry”?

Perry's "primary criticism" of the book is its "prescriptive measure," which in Perry's words amounts to the suggestion that "[b]lack women . . . be more open to marrying outside their race." Earlier coverage by Feminist Law Prof blogger Bridget Crawford is here; lots more at the book's website, here.

Also in the NYT, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (Knopf), by historian and longtime editor of Dissent magazine Michael Kazin. According to Beverly Gage (here), the book is an earnest analysis of the left's failures and successes, and a "bid to reclaim the left’s utopian spirit for an age of diminished expectations."

TNR also offers reviews of The Bear: History of a Fallen King (Harvard/Belknap), by French medievalist Michel Pastoureau (an "odd study," "permeate[d]" with "bitterness" on behalf of the dethroned beast), and Alcibiades(Casement Publishing), by P.J. Rhodes (praised for delivering a "just, and damning" verdict of the "Athenian playboy, general and traitor").

The Wall Street Journal covers four books on Columbus, all by authors without formal training in history ("Faulty Navigators"). Reviewer Felipe Fernández-Armesto is not impressed. "Columbus, like Napoleon and Hitler," he writes, "is an object of fascination among readers. Something of a crank himself, he notoriously attracts cranky authors, as crag calls forth to crag." After providing a glimpse of "the dispiriting litany of errors" he discovered in the texts under review, Fernández-Armesto contemplates "what drives these writers to parade their inadequacies in the marketplace." He urges academic historians to be less welcoming to non-specialists who don't "bother[] to do the basic work."

"I'm bitextual," announces Lawrence Douglas over at the Chronicle Review (a section of the Chronicle of Higher Ed). A professor of law, jurisprudence, and social thought at Amherst and a regular contributor to scholarly conversations, Douglas also just completed his second novel, The Vices (Other Press). Read on here.